I helped a friend yesterday who said that for two days in a row when he started his laptop in the morning, it gave a blue screen of death. This is a pretty common thing for an IT person to hear in the Winter. It doesn’t mean the laptop is broken, often it means that it just got cold.
So I asked him if he had left it somewhere cold and he said that he left it in the trunk overnight. I don’t know why, but people leave their computers in their cars without a second thought. Besides it possibly being stolen, computers don’t like extreme temperatures. If you look some manufacturers actually state this in the owner’s manual. Computers like to be comfortable like humans. If it makes you sweat or makes you cold, then the computer doesn’t like it.
It is really amazing really. Laptops are packed with all kinds of tiny and fragile things. It is amazing they are as durable as they are. Being frozen and then coming back to life, well that is something that only Frosty can relate to.
I actually wrote about this in one of my first posts to this blog. I used to live in Chicago and it got very cold. Besides laptops, iPhones or smartphones need to stay warm as well. There are cases that help protect them from cold weather. However, the best advice is to keep it in your pocket or close to your chest in cold weather.
Besides the cold, computers also hate dust, humidity, acid, motion, and natural disasters. Motion would be major things like moving the computer up and down while you were using it, or trying to use it on a roller coaster. Laptops seem to handle being in a bumpy car pretty well, or most standard forms of transportation, although I’m sure they would have a longer life if they were not used in those situations.